Visitor Profile - 58.8% Not Specified - Who Are They? Aliens?

[gifts_of_elegance]

After months and  months of trying to access my Traffic  Report, I finally managed with Internet Explorer.  I looked at the month of November for answers to my  unsatisfactory sales volume and these are the final results:

Visitor Profile:  3l.5% English (USA), 2.1% English (UK)  1% English (Canada) 0.9% Chinese, 5.7% All Other Languages 

So then, WHO ARE THE 58.8% shown as Not Specified?????????

Operating Systems:  18.7% Windows, 12.7% MacIntosh, 7.5% Windows XP, 3.9% All Others

So then, WHAT KIND OF OPERATING SYSTEMS ARE THE 54.9% shown as Not Specified????

Search Engines:  39.8% Google, 16.3% Google (UK), 12.2% Google (Canada) 6.1% Google (Australia) 4.1% eBay Search Engines

21.4% Other Search Engines

Does that mean that eBay, who we entrust with our listings, who  we pay hundreds & thousands of dollars, and micromanages our businesses,  attracts only 4.1% of the lookers to  our listings?

I have around 1200 listings and only had one small sale on this ever successful Cyber Monday even though over 400 of my listings are on sale with 15% off.  

Does the "Not Specified" percentage represent black out times of our listings?  Or have ALIENS taken a big interest in our items but are unable to purchase because they have not qualified for PayPal yet?

[photosalp]

Aliens? I wonder if they collect stamps? Sorry, it's late at night.

[cumos55]

When a person looks on eBay  ....eBay adds a cookie to that person's  computer.

Now eBay can track what that person does and is in relation to eBay.

I suspect  that some people do not allow cookies... tracking entities .....on their computer

and it is these that show up as ... unknown ...  on the traffic report

[cumos55]

unknown = Not Specified

[rose-dee]

I've been watching my Omniture stats fairly closely since the hacker debacle and things have changed significantly.  For one thing, as you point out, fewer and fewer hits (proportionately) are coming through eBay, even fewer via Google.  We all know what happened there.  

Overall traffic is also way down from last year, and oddly, keyword searches and store search parameters are almost absent, which had not been the case for years prior.  I suspect your dead zone over the past while is not an unusual phenomenon for eBay Canadian sellers.  I've made one small sale in the past week, whereas for the past 5 or 6 years the last weeks in November and first week or two in December have been some of the busiest of the year.  

My guess is that there is a lot more going on in the background with eBay than we know.  I'm not looking forward to 2015. 

[westernstargifts]

After months and  months of trying to access my Traffic  Report, I finally managed with Internet Explorer.  I looked at the month of November for answers to my  unsatisfactory sales volume and these are the final results:

That is strange because I couldn't access my Traffic Report through IE.  After taking Pierre's suggestion I tried Firefox and was able to get it.

Dismal views and sales to match.  I imported my listings to another site and have had a few sales there...more than expected so I will be putting more effort there.

[pocomocomputing]

IE has a few versions out there. So it depends on which version you use. Old Windows XP only could run up to IE8, Vista to IE9. IE 10 came out for Windows 7 SP1, IE 10 and 11 for Windows 8.

So just saying IE does not work for someone is not specific enough. Old IE8 does not work well with eBay as it is too old. It is best to say which version of IE and what operating system when saying something works or does not work.

If you use FireFox, the current version is 34. Most users have automatic updates and FF is kept up to date by doing this. Same with Google Chrome. Both of these browsers work with old windows versions back to XP (I am still using XP).

eBay tries to keep up with FF and Google and IE changes but there may be a time lag for eBay and PayPal to support fully a new version or an update to a version.

Because the FF and GC updates are done automatically, often something that worked the day before does not work after the update.

[westernstargifts]

I'm not that technical pocomo...lol.  But I did buy a new computer last spring and have Windows 7.  Up until then I had the old XP too.

[gifts_of_elegance]

I bought my computer this year in June so it has all the updates.

There is only one place we can look to as a cause for low traffic and sales results and that is eBay.  I have over 1,200 listings at all times, many in quantities.  

In November, I had 2,803 unique lookers, with 7500 page views.  That  is a bit over 2 unique lookers per listing in 30 days.  These figures are an improvement over last year.  My November's monthly sale was 1.6% of my inventory value.  I have been doing a lot of analyzing lately and have reached a conclusion.  All these listing promotions are for the benefit of eBay, to impress their  stock holders.

But they are not "valid" listings, they are not shown and even with 15% discount, it did not bring me sales.  The only listings promoted  are the corporate listings from big stores and even they have their limitations.  I have taken advantage of their low priced auction listings.

I noticed they hardly ever got more than one bid so I made sure I bid first.  90% of the time I won at the low-low price.  I bought  a ton of new inventory that I will make a lot of money on.  There was one item I wanted very bad.  It was listed at $95 and I put $158.89 into my auction sniper.  I watched the auction and there was no bid shown until a few seconds before the end.  It was $95, the starting bid.  I was sure I got it.  I got a big surprise when I tried to pay for it.  I was not the winning bidder.  Someone who bid 5 minutes before the end won.  I checked my auction sniper and all it said was "Not won."  I checked with the seller.  She did not have a block against me.

I found an article that dealt with this issue.  This has happened to a lot of bidders lately.  I have been sniping successfully for over ten years and this was a first.

[reallynicestamps]

All these listing promotions are for the benefit of eBay, to impress their  stock holders.

Yep.

I keep saying, eBay does not pay dividends, so the only way to keep the stockholders happy is to have stock prices go up and down so they can buy when it's low and sell when it's high.

Of course, the ones who really love this are the stockbrokers who charge commission on each of those transactions.